Google Revamps Patent Search To Actually Do What Patent Office Should Do

from the pulling-in-more-info dept

Thu, Jul 16th 2015 10:23pm — Mike Masnick

A few years ago, Google seemed to downgrade its patent search features, pulling away a separate "Google Patents" section and mixing it back into the main Google search. This seemed like a major step backwards, especially given how terrible the US Patent Office's own patent search engine was. Google has tried to do a few things like launching a "prior art finder" and teaming up with StackExchange to help crowdsource prior art. I'm not quite sure how well either program has gone, but Google has now upgraded its patent search efforts yet again to create a service that one would have hoped the patent office would have built itself, though it has not:

The new Google Patents helps users find non-patent prior art by cataloguing it, using the same scheme that applies to patents. We’ve trained a machine classification model to classify everything found in Google Scholar using Cooperative Patent Classification codes. Now users can search for “autonomous vehicles” or “email encryption” and find prior art across patents, technical journals, scientific books, and more.

We’ve also simplified the interface, giving users one location for all patent-related searching and intuitive search fields. And thanks to Google Translate, users can search for foreign patent documents using English keywords. As we said in our May 2015 comments on the PTO’s Patent Quality Initiative, we hope this tool will make patent examination more efficient and help stop bad patents from issuing which would be good for innovation and benefit the public.

Of course, it's not clear if USPTO examiners are even allowed to use tools like this, but it seems like providing better tools to examiners, and widening the corpus that they're allowed to search (right now they focus on past patents and limited journal searches) can only serve to stop at least some bogus patents from getting through.

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Filed Under: patent search, patents, prior art, uspto
Companies: google

13 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 16 Jul 2015 @ 10:40pm

STOP!
Please stop writing articles like this... it only makes clueless congresspeople think "Google can do patents so much better than the PTO so they can do [copyright/dragnet collection/bypassable encryption/etc.] so much better than the government too!".
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- That One Guy (profile), 16 Jul 2015 @ 10:54pm
  
  Re: STOP!
  Not really a problem. Depending on who's talking, Google and other tech companies are either staffed entirely by magical wizards, capable of doing anything if they just wish hard enough, or the scourge of the planet, evil incarnate; articles like this aren't really going to change their minds either way.
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- Mr. Oizo, 16 Jul 2015 @ 10:55pm
  
  Re: STOP!
  Or better, stop talking about Google completely. Techdirt just can't report anything objective on them, for whatever reason. Startstruck or so.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2015 @ 4:44am
    
    Re: Re: STOP!
    Objective means things you agree with?
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- Seegras (profile), 17 Jul 2015 @ 1:17am
  
  Re: STOP!
  Of course google is better in patent research than the patent office.
  
  Because
  a) they are pretty good at search
  b) they have an interest to really find prior art
  
  I don't care what clueless congresspeople infer from that.
  Last time I heard there's a load of them that don't care about science, and believe in things like "backdoors only law enforcements can use", "global warming is not produced by human actions" and "intelligent design is a valable theory".
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  - Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2015 @ 4:46am
    
    Re: Re: STOP!
    Patent office is not interested in prior art and this is quite evident, so why would they search for it?
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2015 @ 12:56am

Does the patent search also provide the reverse lookup:

Which patents would be invalidated by my work, given just a github/me/project link?

That would be awesome. I see it for me: wearing a button at conferences: "I invalidated invalid patents."
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- Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2015 @ 5:25am
  
  Re:
  I would be willing to pay a subscription fee to this kind of service. If software patents are invalid, demonstrating a software only solution to a patent should invalidate said patent. Put dollar amounts on target patents and watch the world scramble to actually have to innovate again for the first time in decades.
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Ninja (profile), 17 Jul 2015 @ 9:56am

It's good for the public and for entrepreneurs as a whole because it provides defense against trolling. Easier defense.
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RickMan (profile), 17 Jul 2015 @ 10:49am

Revamped Patent Search
This sounds great, but since it searches books and articles for prior art, I see Rights Corp sue patent holders for copyright infringement. A whole new area of Trolls trolling trolls.
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Jul 2015 @ 11:38am

Interestingly, now there's so many different websites from google to do patents searches.

http://patents.google.com

Https://www.google.com/patents

and

https://www.google.com/patents/re lated/

Anyway, go to a USPTO public search room. Tools provided, if you know how to use them, are much better than the above. However, these are a nice supplement.
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VG Media, 17 Jul 2015 @ 1:05pm

I feel certain that Google must owe us money for this.
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Not an iSheeple, 23 Sep 2015 @ 10:40am

Why would this NOT be good?
Here is how this works for some of you too clueless to see. Google makes this, helps people find patents, shows it can be done better than the current Patent Office method and the Patent Office gets funding to upgrade their system to improve it. Google closes it's system down because it's no longer needed since the PO one of as good or better. Everyone wins. They've done it a few times before.

However, the down side is Apple would have to go back to coming up with new and innovative ideas again instead of just being patent trolls. Perfect example. Self driving cars. Google has been doing it for years, Apple now announces they will be doing it. Apple will patent something in them that all autonomous cars currently use and sue Google after altering the wording of an existing patent to be granted a new one by the iSheeple PO workers.
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